Sins of omission: what British TV news has missed out of the Afghanistan story

On the day of the fall of Kabul the BBC News Channel did a superb job of covering the story. Philippa Thomas and Reeta Chakrabarti were the presenters as the story started to break. They were consummately professional: calm, authoritative, conducting deeply moving interviews, especially with women from Afghanistan, and handling a fast-breaking news story, backed up by a fine production team. Some of the images and interviews were unforgettable.

That was the highpoint of the BBC’s news coverage. Over the past week or so the story has been increasingly predictable and the coverage has largely failed to offer a broader picture.

First, there has been the parochialism. Almost immediately the BBC, in particular, started attacking the British Government, especially the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. The Government, they said, was too slow to react and was not doing enough. They were quick to quote Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, approvingly by implication, even though Labour had few constructive alternatives to offer. This gave the impression, as ever, that Britain matters a great deal in a world that is increasingly dominated, not just by America, but also more and more by Russia and China.

Second, though the TV news programmes were right to interview the families of British soldiers who were killed on duty in Afghanistan, reporters increasingly gave the sense that these brave soldiers had died in vain. This must have been unbearable for their loved ones. Occasionally, a different narrative emerged: the thousands of mines that had been cleared by troops and by the charity Halo; the rise of education, especially the education of girls in Afghanistan, over the past 20 years; the fact that there hadn’t been a repeat of 9/11. The emphasis on the incompetence of British and American politicians and the failure to point out any achievements over 20 years left everyone, but especially the families of the dead, with the impression that it was all a terrible and predictable waste.

The reporters were nearly all based in Kabul and, of course, many of the people they interviewed, especially the women, were well educated and spoke good English. This is a perennial problem with British news coverage of the Muslim world, from Algeria and Libya to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Viewers get the impression of homogeneous societies which are in reality deeply divided between the country and the city. It was the same story during coverage of the Arab Spring and Syria. The testimonies that mattered were liberal, secular, tolerant. Rural voices, more conservative, religious and intolerant, are rarely heard, simply because reporters don’t go there and most people don’t speak English. What we lose sight of is that for decades there has been an ongoing civil war from Egypt and Iran to Afghanistan and Pakistan, not just a war between the West and the Muslim extremism. 

Part of this civil war has been over the issue of the treatment of women and on social media and in the newspapers of gay rights. Of course, these are hugely important issues, not just in Afghanistan. But, again, the larger picture is missing. Connections are rarely made between Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, perhaps especially neighbouring Iran. Some of the best historical photos on social media are the colour photos of Teheran in the 1950s and 1960s, where you could see women dressed in western clothes, dancing and driving. The contrast with photos of women in the Iran of the Islamic Republic, 20 to 30 years later, is heart-breaking.

But these photos raise larger questions about the link between Muslim extremism and the suppression of women’s rights. This isn’t just about the Taliban. They are just one example of a kind of male panic that runs through the entire Muslim world, and feeds male violence against women, just as it did through central and eastern Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Misogyny was a significant feature of the rise of Fascism and Nazism, as men raged against the rise of feminism in the cities from Weimar Berlin to Red Vienna.

Another curious omission is Pakistan. Watch TV dramas like Spooks and Homeland and Pakistan always looms large. Talking with a friend who is an Afghan refugee, the first thing he said after the fall of Kabul was: “Watch out for Pakistan.” It’s easy to forget that the main reason for the invasion of Afghanistan was to eradicate al-Qaeda, but Osama bin Laden ended up in hiding in rural Pakistan. The role of Pakistan in the Afghan crisis has rarely been properly analysed. Who funds the Taliban? Where do they get their arms?

Finally, anti-Semitism. On social media there have been a few references to the last Jew in Afghanistan, Zabulon Simantov, who prays daily and keeps kashrut laws. Since the death of Yitzhak Levi in 2005, Simantov has been the only Jew in Afghanistan. Jews have lived in Afghanistan since the 8th century and even as late as 1948 there were still 5,000 Jews in Afghanistan. “ In 2013, ” according to the Jewish Virtual Library, “a trove of ancient manuscripts discovered in former Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan provided the first physical evidence of a thriving Jewish community from the area that was more than a thousand years old.”

Again, this isn’t just a story about Afghanistan. This is a story about the entire Muslim world from Morocco to Afghanistan: the expulsion of the Jews, the end of a many centuries-old Jewish presence and with it, of a cultural and religious diversity that had once defined the Middle East and Central Asia since long before the Norman invasion of England, let alone the existence of the United States. This is one of the great stories of human history and yet news programmes have chosen to ignore it almost entirely.

This lack of historical and cultural context has been all too apparent in the past week’s broadcasting. British TV news coverage is much happier gossiping about Dominic Raab, attacking US and British incompetence and showing numerous interviews with desperate people trying to escape from Afghanistan. It is time for more connections, larger contexts, news with a sense of history.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.